I would like to call for a place to list some little things that surprise you about Lion. There are so many articles and lists of all the new features with information overload, I would rather focus this spot of the site on tiny delights with a note why it makes a difference to you.

Please one topic per answer, this isn't a race to enumerate everything that changed. This isn't the place for massive topics like the implications of FileVault 2 on your entire workflow - just a stroll past some little gems, fun oddities or subtle changes specific to Lion.

Answers must relate to why or how you use the feature - links to official tips and tutorials are great, but the intent is to collect little gems that affect how the system gets used. Expect answers that are not specific to lion or lack a personal use case to be heavily edited or deleted.

FileVault 2 encrypts all your data on the drive

(not just the home directory of users opting for FileVault)

Storing the keys in the Recovery HD and requiring an admin to unlock the volume before network and non-white-listed users makes this much more useful to both home users as well as lab settings where many people access one mac.

File Vault 2 does NOT encrypt the whole disk, but only a whole partition which is a serious difference. If you have more than a single partition you can have some partitions unencrypted and others encrypted. The fact, that there are multiple partitions cannot be hidden (as it would be with full disk encryption. If you don't know about this, you'll inadvertedly end up with unencrypted partitions. You also cannot add encryption to a partition with DiskUtility, this is only possible with /usr/sbin/diskutil.
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MacLemonAug 1 '11 at 12:30

Sadly, this only seems to work for dragging to another Space on the same screen. If you drag the app's icon to a Space on a different screen, it highlights during the drag to suggest that it will move the windows there, but doesn't actually move them.
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KenMay 30 '12 at 17:17

Improved app switcher - pause at the end of the loop

It's interesting to see how now the ⌘TAB doesn't loop like crazy if you leave those keys pressed; instead it stops at the rightmost item and only if you press it again it will loop (once) until it reached the rightmost item again.

This avoid crazy looping when you get past the last item if you had a lot of apps open.

I don't know, but Tiger and Snow Leopard did that too. BTW: Windows does that as well I I guess Linux distros / Desktop environments as well.
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Tim BütheSep 2 '11 at 9:55

3

@Tim Büthe - Leopard and Snow Leopard and prior versions of OS X never did this, of course Linux and Windows did it using CUA shortcuts (C-x, C-c, C-v) That's not of use/interest when you're not actually talking about one of those platform. Please cut down the noise, we want signal here. The shortcut on Lion is new, and it's designed in such a way that it addresses Apple's "semantic issue" with "Cut", and instead is copy / move, and not cut / paste.
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SlomojoSep 5 '11 at 1:47

1

The cut/paste method we had previously on Finder was drag/drop (for same Volume move) or drag/Cmd-drop (for moves to external or network volumes) - There was no keyboard equivalent.
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SlomojoSep 5 '11 at 1:54

I like this feature, but I find the little button you have to click a bit finicky. Would rather it just showed the preview it when mousing over the link, but I guess there were performance issues doing it that way.
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scottishwildcatOct 7 '11 at 16:46

Multitouch in Safari

This is hard to describe but Apple made Safari feel like mobile Safari and it's great. When you scroll past the length of a page it bounces like mobile Safari. You can double tap with two fingers to zoom in on a column and ignore the ads or you can use Safari reader to do the same. Also there is a nice animation when you swipe left and right to navigate forward and back. The the end of this video shows the animation.

Local Time Machine snapshots

When not connected to your primary backup drive, time machine can make use of the local hard drive for backing up changes. Yes, I know it doesn't produce any real reliable backup since it's on the startup disk, but it gets merged into the main backup when you connect and preserves the backup history. It's a nice improvement to TM.

This feature will police itself and start to clean up local backups when the free space on your local drive reaches 80% full / 20% free space. As the drive fills, the duration of local backups gets shorter and shorter. This really is working well in practice and I have yet to see any slowdowns with this enabled.

FYi for others, you can tell if local backups are enabled in the Time Machine prefs. If enabled it will say something like "local snapshots as time permits". More info in the unofficial FAQ.
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studgeekJan 16 '13 at 13:42

Hide or filter System Preferences

The customize menu item is new and let's you visually slim down the main icon view.

If you only use a few of the preferences, you can hide most of them from view and have quick access to them all by clicking and holding on the Show All button until the alphabetical full list is drawn.

QuickTime saves audio recordings as M4A.

QuickTime audio recordings are now saved as M4As, instead of MOVs. This makes is so much easier to use the sound in movies and GarageBand rather than having to use a tool to extract the audio track before using it.

Yearless Birthdays

Want to keep track of your friends/family birthdays? Addressbook now lets you add just the month and the day so you don't have to guess how old they are or add a generic year like 2000. These birthdays will then display nicely in iCal to remind you. Makes life nicer for me! :)

You can keep selecting individual files and ranges this way all you want. This was working well in windows but never worked on Mac before Lion.

EDIT: This is not new to Lion, actually. I didn't know this either until I started to share this with friends, but they've insisted, and I've just confirmed, that this behavior was also possible in Snow Leopard.

Multiple SMB share operations are queued rather than parallel

I often copy files around from my media machine in the living room to my laptop. Previously, if you selected a bunch of files, then a few more, then a few more -- the different batches would be done in parallel, slowing each of them down. Now, in Lion, they're queued such that one batch starts when the previous one is completed.

It's nice to have a way to easily bind an Application to a space that way. It's terrible that Apple took away the whole list view so now I have to check each and every Application manually by itself, instead of being able to look up all bound Applications.
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MacLemonAug 1 '11 at 12:35

Smart Zoom on a two-finger double tap

Once you enable (or verify) the system-wide preference, two-finger double tap to zoom in Safari. It lets you zoom into the content of a web page, just like in Mobile Safari. Coupled with full screen mode, it is really easy to resize the page content to fill the screen.

Window/dialog open animations

These animations are elegant and work well when other transitions are in play.

Also a tip, holding ⌥ Option while clicking on a space in mission control switches the mission control view to that space rather than switching to that space normally. This allows for multiple window management operations in one use of mission control

I didn't like this, use defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO to disable.
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joerickJul 31 '11 at 16:58

1

Anyone know a defaults command to get rid of the spaces-switching animation? It's really annoying to have the desktop icons fade out and in again each time I switch. Also it takes more than a second each time which is way too long for me.
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MacLemonAug 1 '11 at 12:37

Mission Control enables new workflows

(whilst frustrating some existing workflows)

My wife was very positively pleased with how Mission Control improves her workflow. MC window grouping, MRU in App Exposé and Spaces management are exactly what she wants.

I have been very negatively surprised at how much Mission Control is a regression for my workflow. It feels like I'm back to the awkward Tiger/Leopard days. I was really flying at window management with Snow Leopard Exposé and App Exposé, minimized windows in app icons and fixed spaces. I find Mission Control lacking in many areas (see my questions for details).

Mission Control fails to scale if you have many windows per application as windows get align-stacked with more than three windows per application. Spreading an application windows with the zoom-in gesture ought to help but does not as they don't spread apart enough nor show minimized windows. Besides one can't work around those limitations by going to the full-spread out App Exposé from Mission Control or preventively handle windows by minimizing them and having them show in Mission Control.

The primary downside is for workflows that expect to go to a space by number or place in the ordering. This is a big interruption for people that don't want Mission Control reordering spaces.

Luckily this reordering can be disabled and you can assign shortcuts to go to existing spaces too.

We're looking for long answers that provide some explanation and context. Don't just give a one-line answer; explain why your answer is right, ideally with citations. Answers that don't include explanations may be removed.